Isn’t Google Wave just fantastic? The first time I got to experience it, I seriously wished that my boss at work should not see this at all. Google has created alot of trouble for us already, we did not wanted anything more.

But Google Wave is awesome. Its really great to see how they do so much of stuff in a browser. After all, a web browser just reads HTML code. Isn’t it? Yeah, you might say we have XML, javascripting, CSS, AJAX ,etc, etc to make great things for browser to show. But I believe biggest of them is still HTML. (Yeah, same old HTML which my Engineering professor once said that I can learn it while sitting on the POT, half n hour every morning for a week. )

Now, the HTML is about to get bigger. Probably, it already has evolved. Hmm… you guessed it write dude. Google Wave is an example. Its all HTML5.

Development of HTML stopped in 1999 with HTML 4. The W3C focused more changing the underlying syntax of HTML from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) to XML. Browser vendors focused on browser features like tabs. Web designers started learning CSS and the JavaScript™ language to build their own applications on top of the existing frameworks using AJAX. But HTML itself grew hardly at all in the next few years.

It all began in 2004 when some key people of famous web browsers like Mozilla, Opera & Safari got together to found WHATWG- Web Hypertext Application Technology Group to address some concerns regarding W3C’s direction with XHTML & lack of interest in HTML.And HTML 5 happened.

So what does HTML 5 offer? Here’s a rundown of the most exciting advancements in the HTML 5 draft specification today:

• A new, sensible tagging strategy. Instead of bundling all multimedia into object or embed tags, video goes in video tags. Audio goes in audio tags, and so on.
• Localized databases. This feature, when implemented, automatically embeds a local SQL database websites can read and write to, speeding up interactive searching, cacheing and indexing functions, or for offline use of web apps that rely on data requests.
• Rich animations without plug-ins. The canvas element gives the browser the ability to draw vector graphics. This means configurable, automatic graphs and illustrations right in the browser without Flash or Silverlight. Some support for canvas is already in all the latest browsers except for IE.
• Real apps in the browser. APIs for in-browser editing, drag and drop, back button “waypoints,” and other graphical user interface abilities.
• Content presentation tags will be phased out, and CSS will rule. For eg, <font>, the font could be set easily through CSS. So who needs <font>.

Here’s a video from Google I/O which talks about HTML 5. Interesting. A bit old though!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AusOPz8Ww80]

Know whether your version of Web Browser still supports HTML 5 or not – here

Resources – WHATWG.org & WebMonkey.

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